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Tag Archives: Customer Service

This is a guest post by Dr. Tracy Maylett, Ed.D.. Dr. Maylett is the Chief Executive Officer of DecisionWise, an HR management and consulting firm specializing in employee engagement. He offers an intriguing viewpoint on providing great customer experience.

Throwing resources at your customer experience does not guarantee a transformative one. You can redesign stores, roll out cool new products, and engage customers on social media. You can implement every form of customer satisfaction measurement known to man. There’s nothing wrong with those steps. But without employees who care, a beautiful store is just a pretty shell. A sparkly new product is just another new release with a limited lifespan—if it even makes it out of the production room.

Without people engaged in their work, where are those cool innovations coming from? Where are the people who care about the superlative customer experience? Don’t get me started on the dangers of having jaded staffers interacting with customers on social media.

It All Begins with Your Employees

Creating a strong customer experience is like gardening: hoping and measuring won’t give you the results you want. Gardening requires tending to the components that create the desired outcome: using soil amendments, watering, and weeding. The gardener can’t do much more than that. But, assuming it’s done well, the odds of a solid harvest are high.

Growing a successful organization works in the same way. Success comes through quality products, stellar customer support, prudent financial decisions, great leadership, and employees who personally care about delivering an extraordinary customer experience. When an organization can create a top-notch Employee Experience, the likelihood of delivering a superior customer experience increases exponentially.

The opposite is also true: When employee experience is poor, the customer experience will reflect it. We call this the “Law of Congruent Experience.”

Tema Frank founded Web Mystery Shoppers International, the world’s first company to test omnichannel customer service. Her new book, People Shock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule, shows off both her decades of business experience and the research from interviewing over 150 business leaders. She developed a formula to help businesses improve the customer experience in the midst of a digitized world.

I recently asked her about her research.

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“The key to getting work done on time is to stop wearing a watch.” –Ricard Semler

As we automate more and artificial intelligence wipes out jobs, the smaller amount that is left for human to human interaction becomes critical. Companies that are people-focused (while using technology to support those people) are the ones that will win in an era of increasing competition and social media power. If you get the people side right, PeopleShock is your key to success. Ignore it and your company will soon be history.

Get the 3Ps of Profit Right

Customers are cranky, and they’ve got more choices than ever before. So you’ve got to keep them happy, and that means getting all of the 3 Ps of Profit right:

Promise – Having a clear aspirational, inspirational and memorable reason for doing what you do inspires staff and customers. It also gives staff a filter for decision-making: Would their action be consistent with the company’s promise?

People – Business success comes from connecting effectively at a human level with people inside (staff) and outside your organization. Outsiders include not only prospects and customers, but people we sometimes overlook, like suppliers, distributors, lenders, investors, media and the public.

Process – As time goes by, some of the processes that got you to where you are stop making sense. To deliver consistently great customer experiences, you have to regularly re-assess how you’ve been doing things. Start by looking at processes from a customer point of view. What do they experience? Then look at how that lines up with what you do internally.

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“CEOs are the ones who must conduct the corporate orchestra.” –Tema Frank

This week is Customer Service Week, a week to remind organizations of the importance of customers and the week to especially celebrate those who provide this service day in and day out.

In honor of Customer Service Week, I want to share a conversation I had with an expert in the field of customer service, Mark Sanborn. Mark is an extraordinary professional speaker, the bestselling author of numerous books on customer service and leadership, and a personal friend. His many books have inspired me and countless others to raise our own performance and deliver exceptional service.

In this brief nine-minute conversation, we talk about:

What differentiates extraordinary customer service from average service

How good recovery means everything if you miss

How to use creativity instead of capital to fix customer service problems

The danger of indifference

Overcompensating for customer service misses

How leaders can develop a customer service culture throughout an organization

Some companies are leveraging the power of the Internet in such a powerful way they are increasing market share, earnings, and revenue at an incredible rate. Others are struggling, not fully realizing the potential or understanding what it takes to win with today’s technology.

It’s All About Attitude

What differentiates winners from losers?

John Patrick’s answer is that it is all about attitude. He says companies with a “net attitude” have an extraordinary advantage over those who don’t.

Having a net attitude “makes constituents happy,” says John Patrick. Because your “website is your brand,” it’s important to make it accessible, easy to use, and focused relentlessly on a positive customer experience.

Why Customer Satisfaction Hasn’t Budged in Decades

You share a statistic that customer satisfaction hasn’t improved since the 1970’s. After all the books, the seminars, the new programs, nothing has changed. Why not? What are companies missing?

Customer service has historically played out in private. So even though companies have always said they emphasized it (nobody says “we deliver shoddy customer service” even when they do) they haven’t truly HAD to emphasize it. And doing it well is complex and somewhat expensive in the short term. So nothing has ever really changed. But now, customer service is becoming a spectator sport, and the truths of good vs. bad customer service are out in the open and impacting buying decisions.

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80% of businesses believe they deliver superior service, but just 8% of customers agree.

Let’s say you are about to deal with a customer complaint. How do you get in the right mindset?

Don’t take it personally. Remember that the customer is using THEIR time to try to tell you how to make your company better. And remember that you don’t know what the customer has been through. And then embrace that answering a complaint increases customer advocacy, every time.

Social media has given on-stage haters a platform like never before. Businesses were not prepared. What’s the first piece of Jay Baer advice you usually give a business?

This may be a paradox, but our advice at Convince & Convert to companies looking to improve their social media customer service is to first make sure their offstage customer service is outstanding. If you’re not great at phone and email, all you’re going to do is push people from those channels to social media and back again. Be a great walker before you run!